Roberto Scarpetti. Dying moments.
Роберто Скарпетти
What did you mean by making the same actors play out all three of the stories? Was it intended as all people being alike?
NO, it's not like that. I just meant that a man and a woman (the exactly same man and same woman) have different possibilities to fall in love with each other. And these possibilities are given by the situation in which they met. So, it's not the right person we should find, but the right person at the RIGHT TIME. That's exactly what happens in the short film: the charecters are always the same, but just to a couple of them is given the possibility to fall in love, 'cose they meet at the right time.
The beginning of the story is shot as a porno video parody. There is something about it because everyone has seen films like that and expects your film to develop in a certain way. Is it true?
I didn't mean that. I just wanted the three parts of the story to look different from each other. And for all the scenes shot in interior I wanted a kind of "hot look".
How important to you is that love/sex/relationship theme in cinema? What are your likes and dislikes in films that try to convey that theme?
It is a strange question. I mean feature films always talk about men and women, in all the aspects of their life, and love, sex and partenership are important issues in everyone's life. So in every kind of movies, there is always a part of the story involving sex and love and commitment.
Anyway I don't go to see movies like "Autumn in New York " or "Sweet November" or "Love actually" and so on. I like indeed a certain kind of romantic comedies like "Four weddings and a funeral" or "Born romantic" or "Closer" and so on.
You wrote the script together with Chiara Laudani . Who did the idea belong to? When and why did you decide to work on this particular story?
I started to think about this short film talking with Sarah Baumann, the actress of the movie, at a party. She's a very close friend of mine and we started to say that it would have been very nice to do something together and, immediatly, there at the party, we said that it would have been interesting work on something divided in 3 parts, talking about love and with just a couple of actors playing all the roles.
Then I kept thinking about it and I started to develop it with Chiara Laudani, a scriptwriter whom I always work with. It was summer 2003. In spring 2004 I was ready to start the pre-production and I involved a lot of people from school (I'm graduated in scriptwriting at Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia - the Italian school of cinema - in 1999). So, the editor, the cinematographer, the sound engineer were all school mates and actually they all work very well in Italian cinema and TV industry. At the end of July 2004 we started to shoot.
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We had to dry the windows of the taxi at every take to take off the wet look!!! |
movie still
What is special about producing an independent film in Italy (financing, equipment, organizing and etc)? Who helped you or did you pull out that work yourself? What was the budget?
It's not quite easy to work in independent movies in Italy : there are no money and there isn't a great interest in those kind of production, especially for short films. I have to say that my short films are in a certain way more popular abroad, in England above all. Anyway, the movie was quite cheap, thanks to all the friend who worked for free, and it cost between 700,00 and 800,00 euros.
What was the funniest making of story?
The funniest thing was at the moment a very terrible thing. The short film was shot in July, and you know how Italian summer is: hot and dry. Well we had rain for 2 days on 4 of shooting, and it didn't rain for the previous month and the next one. It was quite hard, in a movie shot mostly in exterior, to have that look of Italian summer...
But all together, we managed to solve any kind of difficult situation. i.e. the first scene of the taxi driver story is shot under a huge porch in front of the main entrance of a building while outside it was raining.
We had to dry the windows of the taxi at every take to take off the wet look!!!
What is the fate of this film? What does short film distribution look like in Italy ?
There is no theatre distribution for short films in Italy , only on cable and sat TV. There are a lot short film festivals in Italy , but the audience is a professional one. I just sold "Il tempo di morire" to an Italian sat tv channel.
What is the most important thing for you in cinema? Who are your favorite filmmakers?
The film I like the most are the ones that, in any way, can touch my heart. I like moving films, it doesn't matter if it's a comedy, a thriller, an horror, a drama. I want to go to a theatre as much as I can and everytime I want to get in, sit in the dark, watch a story and get into that, forgetting everything about me and the world outside. I like movies that create a world and I like when I feel part of that world even though it's just for only two hours.
My favorite filmmakers are: Wong Kar-Wai, David Lynch, Francis Ford Coppola, Pierpaolo Pasolini, Luchino Visconti, Stanley Kubrick, Francois Truffaut, Ken Loach, Peter Weir, Terrence Malick, Paul Thomas Anderson, Pedro Almodovar, Billy Wilder. I have to stop or my list will get longer and longer.
But I can just add that I love a specific kind of British cinema, that one able to mix in a perfect way drama, comedy and social commitment.
What are your plans?
Nowadays I'm working on three other shorts, I hope to realize them soon.
© Shortы 2006